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Flu Story: A Pregnant Woman’s Ordeal

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The group most threatened by swine flu and most in need of the new vaccine, world health authorities agree, is that of pregnant women.

For example, Aubrey Opdyke.

On June 27, Ms. Opdyke, a 27-year-old waitress and former high-school swimmer who weighed 135 pounds before her pregnancy and had no health risks other than a smoking habit, came down with mild flu symptoms.

She finally came home from the hospital three weeks ago.

“At first, I didn’t think anything of it — just another flu bug,” Ms. Opdyke said recently. “But it really wrecked me. I probably shouldn’t have made it.”

In the four months she was hospitalized, she spent five weeks in a coma, suffered six collapsed lungs and a near-fatal seizure. High-pressure ventilation blew her up like a molten balloon until “she looked like she weighed 400 pounds,” her husband, Bryan, said, and she has stretch marks from her neck to her ankles. Her muscles and lungs are still so weak that she uses a walker.

And, most important, she lost her baby. Parker Christine Opdyke, almost 27 weeks in the womb, was delivered by emergency Caesarean section on July 18, when her fetal heart rate plummeted during Ms. Opdyke’s third lung collapse. Her airways were too blocked to let a breathing tube in, possibly a side effect of the drugs saving her mother. She lived seven minutes.

On Oct. 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 100 pregnant women had been in intensive care with swine flu and 28 had died. That is a tiny fraction of what are believed to have been millions of cases in the country. But it is the best argument, federal officials say, for the drawn-out, expensive effort to make a swine flu vaccine.

Pregnant women are particularly susceptible because they are in the younger age group most likely to catch this new virus, while those over 50 who have had more flus rarely catch it. Moreover, pregnancy suppresses the immune system to protect the fetus, and the growing baby makes it harder for a mother to clear her lungs.

All but a few of the pregnant women who have died or been near death from swine flu are unknown. Privacy laws prevent health departments from releasing their names, and few families come forward.

The Opdykes did because “we wanted to get it out there how dangerous it can be,” Ms. Opdyke said.

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ILL Swine flu put Aubrey Opdyke in the hospital, and she lost her baby.Credit
Scott Wiseman for The New York Times

“We have friends who get flu symptoms and say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to a doctor,’ ” Mr. Opdyke added. “And we say, ‘Do you not understand what we went through?’ I can’t imagine why there’s so much nonchalance.”

That nonchalance strikes close to home.

As they said this, Ms. Opdyke was doing her daily physical therapy, struggling to lift one-pound weights. Her therapist interrupted to announce that she opposed flu shots.

“Have you ever read the labels?” she asked. “They’re so full of toxins.”

Asked if she realized that a shot, had it existed in June, might have saved her client and her baby, she frowned and went back to her clipboard.

Unlike some other families that came forward, the Opdykes are not threatening to sue anyone.

They do not blame her obstetrician, even though she suggested acetaminophen the first time Ms. Opdyke called her and prescribed an antibiotic the second.

“Swine flu just wasn’t on our minds at all,” Ms. Opdyke said.

Nor are they angry at the Wellington Regional Medical Center. “I don’t think if I’d taken her anywhere else, she would have survived,” Mr. Opdyke said.

Her flu came on gradually, and she never had a high fever. But after a week of feeling exhausted and achy, she became delirious. When Mr. Opdyke drove her to the hospital, with his finger on the door-lock button for fear she would jump out, she could not tell the triage nurse her name.

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Her blood oxygen level was below 70; normal is 95, and below 80 is life-threatening. Both lungs were full of fluid.

Thrashing, she knocked off oxygen masks and pulled out an intubation tube. Panic made her hyperventilate. Doctors finally sedated her into a paralytic coma to let the ventilator work.

She survived near-failure of her kidneys, then her lungs, damaged by continuous high-pressure oxygen, began collapsing. Mr. Opdyke was warned he might have to choose — her life or that of the baby, who was just at the border of survivability outside the womb.

“I said, ‘Save Aubrey,’ ” he said of the woman he married last year. “I can make another baby, but I can’t replace her.”

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IN RECOVERY Aubrey Opdyke working with Pam Smith, an occupational therapist in Florida.Credit
Scott Wiseman for The New York Times

Her third lung collapse forced the issue. Parker had to be delivered, but she did not survive.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a photographers’ charity for families of premature infants, offered to take black-and-white pictures. Ms. Opdyke’s mother bathed Parker and brushed her hair.

“Some people don’t agree,” Mr. Opdyke said about having the photographs taken. “But for me there was no option. Aubrey wasn’t awake, she didn’t get to bond. If I didn’t do it, there’s no way I could make it up to her.”

Aubrey Opdyke started to recover, then developed a bacterial infection common to ventilator patients. She nearly succumbed, then rallied and doctors started to wean her off the coma-inducing drugs. She had weeks of hallucinations about a friendly white dog visiting her but could not ask about it because of the tube.

Mr. Opdyke took comfort from what he saw as divine signs. Dog is “God” backwards, he noted. And one day, in a panic because he had forgotten to wear his wife’s wedding ring around his neck, he saw a license plate reading “FAITH.”

Ms. Opdyke’s last crisis was a still-unexplained seizure during a family visit. Her mother had been painting her nails and blamed herself, thinking the fumes had done it.

Now that she is home, in the townhouse complex they rent near the West Palm Beach airport, Ms. Opdyke is struggling to regain her strength. Muscles atrophy into rubber bands; every day in a coma means two days’ recovery.

She apologizes for the messy yard; she would pick it up but barely has the strength to get upstairs to bed. Mr. Opdyke has gone back part-time to his job at UPS.

Mr. Opdyke worries he gave her the flu. “I was sick two weeks before,” he said. “I touch packages that have been touched a thousand times. If anybody’s going to catch it, it’s me.”

He said he had not yet looked at the bills. His insurance covered most, he said, “but it had to be over a million, and we owe 20 percent; I’m not ready for that many commas.”

Friends from their jobs and a Girl Scout charity that Ms. Opdyke once ran with her mother have raised over $10,000 by holding benefits, and small checks have come in after articles by local journalists. “It’s a lot of help,” Ms. Opdyke said. “It really shows the compassion of people.”